Author's information automately linked

[miguelcazorla]

Hi folks:

When an author introduce author's information for an article, it needs to introduce individual information for each author (except for himself, which is gotten from database). This is tedious for authors and could produce repetitive inputs in author list. In fact, we have this problem (the same author appears twice with the same name). Am I doing anything incorrectly? Please, could anybody explain me how the author information is linked in database?

Thanks, Miguel

[jmacgreg]

Hi Miguel,

The author information you enter during submission isn't actually explicitly linked to users in the system -- that's a feature, not a bug. In a nutshell, the author information you enter during submission is actually submission *metadata* -- it's tied to the article and can be searched against etc., but is not tied to users within the system. This allows users who are Authors to submit files on behalf of real-life authors, for example.

This does become an issue when small errors are introduced or different emails are used and it looks like the same author appears twice in the Browse by Author list, for example, but it's unavoidable -- we have to make allowances for the possibility of different authors having the same name, for one thing. My advice would be to check the submission metadata for each 'unique' author's articles, and ensure that their author information is exactly the same, including spaces, etc.

Cheers,
James

[miguelcazorla]

Hi James:

Thanks for the aclaration. I was wondering something like you told me. But I wanted to be sure I was doing everything correctly.

Just as a suggestion: in other engines like OJS, there is an option to allow authors to search preexisting authors in order to include their personal data. This might avoid duplicate entries and mantain a consistent information. May be in a future version¿?¿?

Thanks a lot for your work. It is really important and very useful!.

Miguel

[jmacgreg]

Hi Miguel,

Thanks for the comments, and the suggestion in particular -- I will definitely keep it in mind, and we may very well be able to fit it into a future version.

Cheers,
James